For millions of people, in Mexico and the world, they became a kind of martyrs and a symbol of the horrors that a State is capable of reaching when it is in collusion with criminal organizations.
For others, they were victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a country that is like a minefield and where taking a false step is fatal.
There is even a radical minority that has wanted to present them as troublemakers who paid with their lives for the mistake of getting involved where they shouldn't (and who ended up being politically exploited after their disappearance).
What is certain is that the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School who were kidnapped in the municipality of Iguala, Guerrero, on September 26, 2014,
Throughout the almost eight years that have passed since the events, all kinds of versions of what happened have been disclosed, including the famous "historical truth", defended by the then prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam (arrested last Friday, under charges of forced disappearance and torture) and adopted by the federal government as a whole until the change of colors in the Administration in 2018. That version, in short, proposed that the young people, who were taking transport trucks by force to take them to a protest, they were murdered and their bodies incinerated by the Guerreros Unidos criminal group, with the support of bribed municipal police officers.
The criminals would have confused them with members of Los Rojos, a rival organization.
This position was never accepted by the parents of the students,
Upon reaching the presidency in 2018, the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador discarded the previous investigation and formed a Truth Commission of the
Ayotzinapa Case
, which has been adopting the approach that the disappearance of the students was an episode that required, in addition to the criminal will of Guerreros Unidos, the broad participation of institutions, including military commanders and the federal, state and municipal police , and also law enforcement authorities at all levels.
This, of course, not only to make young people disappear, but also to alter crime scenes, falsify information and hide data.
The Federal Prosecutor's Office issued arrest warrants against 46 former officials related to the matter, including the person in charge of the original investigation, Tomás Zerón, who evaded justice and is currently in Israel.
As if this were not enough, at least twenty-six people relevant to the investigation have died during its development,
adds the Commission.
The
Ayotzinapa case
, then, is turbidity incarnate.
The arrest of Murillo Karam has raised controversy.
From the opposition it is pointed out that, more than a measure of justice, it is a media maneuver that will end up fading and they recall what has happened with the arrests of former officials Rosario Robles (free since last week) and Emilio Lozoya (who enjoyed months of freedom and whose accusations against the past administration have not reached anything concrete yet).
In what the new investigation does coincide with the discarded one is in the fact that there is no possibility that those young people, from marginal and popular communities, who were taken against their will and massacred and whose tragic fate continues to overshadow the country.
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